Thrills like a Dark Ages theme park2halfstars Go to showtimes

Published 6:30 am, Friday, November 16, 2007

The Viking hero, Beowulf, sets out to avenge the death of his men in Beowulf.

The Viking hero, Beowulf, sets out to avenge the death of his men in Beowulf.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

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A fierce dragon terrorizes Beowulf's kingdom in Beowulf.

A fierce dragon terrorizes Beowulf's kingdom in Beowulf.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

Beowulf

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Look, it's been a while since I last read Beowulf, so maybe English poesy scholars can help me with a minor detail. Did Grendel's mother have nipples, or not?

In this newfangled computer-enhanced movie adaptation, she doesn't have any. She does have Angelina Jolie's curvaceous bod, which shows up nude (minus some other, ahem, defining features) in a few moments of Wild Things-style liquid seduction.

Watching this scene — watching almost any scene in Beowulf — one easily pictures director Robert Zemeckis and writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary hashing out the delicate calculus of How Much to Show and still get that coveted PG-13 rating. Breasts are OK. Crotches, so long as they aren't really specific crotches, are fine. A monster crunching on a sixth-century warrior's head: cool. Man hacking off his own arm through chain mail: no prob. Anthony Hopkins' lily-white digitized fanny: priceless.

Keep in mind, the knighted fanny is in 3-D — or it was in the Beowulf I saw. Three versions of the film open today, one in the usual two planar dimensions, two in a nifty-looking three (including full-blown IMAX, which I didn't catch). Seeing it required a pair of blocky black Clark Kent spectacles and a stable digestive system, which had to withstand the illusion of unsavory projectiles headed straight for my face. These included, in no particular order, rats, spear points, roast squirrel, falling corpses, severed monster arm, spewing blood, more falling corpses and a long string of translucent, swaying demon spittle, which just about brushed my lap. (You think you're feeling nauseated?)

The narrative rationale behind these phantasmagorical gross-outs is the anonymous epic poem of yore, which tells the tale of the hero Beowulf (Ray Winstone) and his legendary smackdown of the monster Grendel. In this reboot, the wintry Danish countryside and everyone in it are rendered in an improved version of the "performance-capture" technique that first plasticized Tom Hanks in The Polar Express. The process, which takes live-action footage and then shapes and buffers it digitally, worked better in the Zemeckis-produced Monster House, mainly because it made no effort at realism. That was a cartoon, plain and simple.

Beowulf isn't. I'm not sure what it is or who it's for (not kids). But it's imaginative, and it has the barreling forward motion and lurching thrills of a Dark Ages theme park, even when it's exercising battle-worn clichés — even when it looks like a mythic, manly Shrek that's soused on mead. Some of Zemeckis' creative decisions make absolutely no sense, such as encouraging Grendel (Crispin Glover) to mangle every line of dialogue beyond the point of aural recognition. I think, but I'm not sure, that at one point he tells Mother the name of the fellow who attacked him. But all I could hear was, "Heeessss naooom wesss Bowwwullllv."

Grendel looks like one of those skinless cadavers touring the country in Body Worlds 3. Mom has a braided tail; for reasons I can't figure, she speaks with a Hungarian accent. Beowulf, I might add, has the inflated musculature and minimalist fashion sense that turned 300 into an Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bag. But Winstone does his job, which is to glower magnificently and say stuff like, "Mine is strength and lust and power! I am Beowulf!" while wrestling Grendel in the nude.

This isn't Eastern Promises — we don't see Beowulf's central plumbing, just his own slightly-less-lily-white backside. Some details are best left to the imagination, at least in PG-13.